Announcements

SIGNIFICATIONS 2018: CALL FOR PAPERS

Presenting research at Significations allows current Graduate Students the opportunity to share their research, engage in academic discussion of their work, and participate in the unique realm of academic conferences.

Paper Topics: Significations Graduate Student Conference theme for 2018 is “Inventing Otherness, Dissent, and Controversy.” This conference invites submissions that question the essence of individuality, the process of “otherness” and contextualization of dissent and controversial topics. We also accept submissions that go beyond the conference theme. Due to the interdisciplinary nature of the conference, we welcome all fields of study. Some fields of interest include: Critical Theory, Philosophy, History, Linguistics, Cultural Studies, Pan-African American Studies, Native American Studies, Sociology, Psychology, and anything including the Natural and Social Sciences.

Submission Guidelines: Papers must be between 8 and 10 pages in length, excluding Works Cited and endnotes. All papers must be in strict accordance with MLA 8 guidelines. Only electronic submissions significations.csula@gmail.com will be accepted. All submissions must be in .docx Microsoft Word. All submissions must include a cover sheet and a 250-word maximum abstract with a bolded one-sentence thesis statement (in a separate attachment). Cover sheets must state the following information: name, paper title, street address, email address, phone number, and institutional affiliation. All personal identifying information must be removed from the header and bodies of the paper for the submission process. One submission per student.

All submissions will receive feedback from the reviewers. All accepted work will be collected in a Conference Proceedings book, sponsored by the CSULA English Department.

Submission Deadline: February 28, 2018

Henri Coulette at the Huntington Library, Nov 11th

The work of Henri Coulette will be celebrated at the Huntington Library on November 11 (2 pm), with a reading of The War of the Secret Agents, his award-winning book of poems from 1966. Readers will include Timothy Steele, Jacqueline Coulette, Peter Brier, Robert Mezey, and Peter Everwine.

Entering its 68th year of publication, Statement Magazine is California State University, Los Angeles’s student-run journal of literature and art. Students gain valuable professional and educational experience by assuming responsibility for all aspects of producing this magazine and learning many new skills. Major national and international writers and artists appear in its pages alongside talented creative students, many of whom have gone on to become highly respected figures themselves.

Statement’s pages have been graced by U.S. Poet Laureate Rita Dove and Los Angeles’s first Poet Laureate Eloise Klein Healy, along with countless others including Wanda Coleman, Charles Bukowski, Ai, Luis Rodriguez, Carolyn See and Sesshu Foster. Statement has also been distinguished with national recognition.

In 2008, the magazine received the National Program Director’s Prize in Content from the Association of Writers and Writing Programs, competing against the literary magazines of 400 other universities.

Statement Magazine is affiliated with California State University, Los Angeles. All rights reserved.

This book explores an archive of modernist literature that conceives survival as a collective enterprise linking lives across boundaries of race, time, class, species, gender, and sexuality. As social Darwinism promoted a selfish, competitive, and combatively individualistic understanding of survival, the four modernists examined here countered by imagining how postures of precarity, vulnerability, and receptivity can breed pleasurably and environmentally sustainable modes of interdependent survival. These modes prove particularly vital and appealing to queer bodies, desires, and intimacies deemed unfit, abnormal, or unproductive by heterosexist ideologies. Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle” opposes “survival of the fittest” doctrines and Progressive-era masculinity with a feminist-inspired cultivation of ecological humility and interspecies collaboration. Oscar Wilde develops an autobiographical form that expresses collective subjectivity in De Profundis, an epistolary testament to the constitutive role of suffering in queer community formation. E.M. Forster imagines, in Howards End, how queer ideas and intimacies survive courtesy of invitations that awaken both inviters and invitees to unexpected relational possibilities freed from conventional timelines of development and realization. In Forster’s A Passage to India, the pursuit of “queer invitations” models an evolutionary succession defined by careful attention to creaturely inheritance and by ethical responses to the countless lives, including those obfuscated by imperial privilege, required for the successful survival of any individual life. Finally, Willa Cather’s short and long fiction, including “Consequences,” Lucy Gayheart, and The Professor’s House, argues for suicide as a way of life as it transforms the impulse to throw life away into an ethical alternative to the greedy logics of capitalism.

Benjamin Bateman, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, English and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Director, Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities

Cal State Los Angeles

Author of The Modernist Art of Queer Survival (forthcoming from Oxford University Press)